


I am Ready and Willing to Die

by I_have_a_Mycroft_of_my_very_own



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, I just couldn't let them die, in which Jyn and Chirrut are more than a little Force Sensitive, okay?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-30
Updated: 2016-12-30
Packaged: 2018-09-13 09:53:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9118516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_have_a_Mycroft_of_my_very_own/pseuds/I_have_a_Mycroft_of_my_very_own
Summary: It's not a dream, no matter how much she wants to call it one. They've never been just 'dreams'. They've always been second chances.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Willing to Die by Gin Wigmore.

_You can take my man, you can take my heart_  
_I'll be ready and waiting for you here_  
_In the streets I live, for the home I have_  
_I am ready and willing to die_  
_-Willing to Die, Gin Wigmore_

* * *

 

She remembers the brightness that was her death encroaching. She remembers the feel of the sand against her already abraded skin. She remembers the warmth of Cassian beside her, and the heavy yet comfortable weight of acceptance upon her soul. She remembers being ready to die.

She wakes gasping and horrified, and safe and secured in her cell.

It was just a dream.

* * *

She doesn’t fight when the rebel extraction team come for her. In the back of her mind is her dream, and if it’s like the ‘dreams’ she’s had in the past, she needs to ensure it can’t come true. She goes willingly, and she doesn’t cause any trouble.

Kaytoo is _still_ unimpressed by her.

* * *

When they ask about Saw Gerrera she admits to them that she may know where he is, and may know how to get into contact with him. They ask about her motivations. She can’t tell them the truth, so she tells them that her mother died telling the Imperialists to go to hell, she’d consider her life worth it if she could do the same. They buy it, of course they do.

* * *

Jedha is a lost cause, she knows it even as they land, but Jedha is necessary for the message, and for Bodhi, Chirrut, and Baze. Jedha is necessary so she can try to save Saw, even if she knows he won’t come.

* * *

“That’s a pretty necklace you have there, girl.” Jyn turns immediately to the voice, ignores everything else around her and focusses solely on getting to the voice. “Trade it for a glimpse into your future?” Jyn stops, takes a deep breath in and forces herself to continue walking to the blind man that meant so much to her in her dreams.

“Do you know me?” she asks, before he can continue. He smiles, and his smiles have always been off-putting, in the way that they make you question everything that you know, and she’s questioning.

“You tell me, girl.”

“Chirrut.” Jyn states, confidently and without hesitation. His smile is real, and he acknowledges her with a nod.

“Jyn Erso.” Jyn could cry with excitement and happiness and relief, but she doesn’t. Because that future, the future she saw in her ‘dream’, it could still come true.

“Did you see it? Did you see the Stardust?” she questions, and she doesn’t know what she wants him to tell her, she doesn’t want someone else to have seen all that death and destruction, but she doesn’t want to carry the burden alone.

“I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me. All is as the Force wills it, Jyn Erso.” He replies, and there is a sadness and regret in his voice that tells Jyn all she needs to know.

“We must stop it.”

“Yes.”  

“Jyn, we don’t have much time!” suddenly Cassian is there, and Jyn is being pulled away.

“Chirrut, come with me.”

“Jyn?” Cassian exclaims, bringing them to a stop. “This City is about to blow, we need to get out of here.”

“Not without Chirrut. We need him.”

“What for?”

“Trust goes both ways, Cassian! Trust me!”

“Fine!”

“Very well, it would seem it is time to leave Jedha City.” Chirrut states, climbing to his feet, it is the invitation Baze needs to come out of hiding.

“Chirrut?”

“Come, Baze, these lovely people are going to give us a ride out of here.”

* * *

Jyn takes them to Saw, she doesn’t let them get caught up in the fighting in the City, they don’t have time for that. No time for that at all.

“Tell Saw that Jyn Erso wishes to speak with him.” Saw’s band of troublemakers are rough and moody as always, but they do as Jyn says, there is no telling what they risk if they refuse her and she truly is Jyn.

Saw greets her with happiness, let it never be said that Saw Gerrera never cared for her. Jyn wishes to talk with him for a time, but she knows they don’t have time for that.

“My father’s message, you have it. Show it to me.” Jyn demands, and Saw complies, because he knows the look in her eyes. Her ‘dreams’ were often the means by which they managed to escape during the ten years she was in his care. Saw glances once at her companions before he plays the message.

* * *

“You have to come with us.” Jyn states the moment the message cuts out as the rumbling begins. She ignores them all as she pulls the memory chip from the computer and tucks it away safe in a pocket. “You have to.”

“If you insist.” And Jyn’s thrown momentarily by the willingness until she realizes that Saw is only giving in because he _knows_ she’s operating on the information from her ‘dreams’. Saw has never ignored her ‘dreams’. 

“We need the pilot, too.” Jyn states, only for someone to clear their throat, and when she turns, Baze is standing there with Bodhi, who looks a little dazed, but otherwise all there. She didn’t notice either Chirrut or Baze leaving to get him. Perhaps her single-minded focus is _too_ single-minded. “We need to leave!”

* * *

The scramble out of Jedha is chaos and terror, but they make it, all of them, and they’re in the air and jumping to hyperspace before Jyn even has time to contemplate how the changes she has made will affect the future.

* * *

Eadu is still an experience, not because they crash, but mostly because Jyn stares Cassian down when the captain tries to give orders.

“You’re not going to kill him.”

“What?” Cassian exclaims, completely thrown off guard.

“Don’t think I don’t know what your orders were. Extracting my father was never the plan, you wanted to find him to kill him.”

“I would take issue with that.” Saw states from the corner of the ship he’s claimed as his own.

“So, you’re not going to kill him. We’re going to go in there and we’re going to extract him, and that’s that.”

“Jyn, that’s-“

“I’ll get him myself if I have to.” _The Force knows I almost did it before._

* * *

The bombs still drop but by some miracle, some manipulation by the Force, her father isn’t killed. Chirrut just smiles at her whenever she tries to have conversations with him entirely through his senses. He doesn’t want to talk of the future they both witnessed when there are so many here with them. _We watched them die, and here they are. We watched ourselves die, and here we are!_ She wants to yell at him, yell at him so someone can speak the words back to her. So someone can confirm to her once again that her ‘dream’ was, at least at one time, a reality.

_We watched them die._

* * *

She hands over the memory chip to the Council, provides her side of the story and then withdraws from all discussion to be at her father’s side. He may not have died in the bomb blast, but that doesn’t mean he’s unscathed. They’re in some strange kind of limbo. Jyn knows that if the Council decides not to fight, Rogue One will die alone on the beach on Scarif again. She knows the only regret she’ll have is that she wouldn’t be able to save them.

* * *

The Council decides not to fight. Jyn’s heart aches with the knowledge that she is going to condemn so many brave and heroic people to death. But it doesn’t change the fact that she _will_ do it. She learnt a long time ago at Saw’s knee how to do what you had to for the greater good, even if it killed you inside, and this time it’ll kill her on the outside, too.

* * *

She sits at her father’s bedside, and when she thinks he’s sleeping, she tells him her plans. She tells him about what happened in her ‘dreams’, and she tells him everything that she must do. She tells him she loves him and that she forgives him, and then she leaves him, so she can get ready.

* * *

“I can draw the plans!” her father yells, as she and her crew are getting ready to leave, it brings everything to a stop. “I can draw the plans.” He shouldn’t even be out of bed yet, and it looks like he’s dragged most of the medical equipment with him in his haste to get to them. “I made those plans, I can redraw them.”

“Papa-“

“Scarif is a suicide mission, _Stardust_.” He tells her, desperate for her to stop.

“Papa, you shouldn’t be out of bed.”

“I’ll go back, if you stay.”

“We need the plans, papa.”

“I can draw them, Jyn. I can draw them.” There is no hesitation in his voice, not like she remembers from him when he’s uncertain in himself. She sighs heavily and slumps her shoulders.

“Fine. Not like we can sneak away now, anyway.” She states, smiling at the mumbled agreement she gets from her crew, from Rogue One. She turns to them and smirks. “Hey, if papa draws them the plans and they decide they still don’t want to fight, we can have first crack at the Death Star.” She tells them in a muted whisper and smiles at the nods she receives. These people want to fight. They want to know what they’re doing has worth. She lets them believe that.

Now they don’t have to die on Scarif.

But she and Chirrut… they’ll always remember it.

They’ll always remember dying on the sand on Scarif so they could bring the Alliance _hope._


End file.
